ABSTRACT
Gregor Johann Mendel was a lonely worker. The foolish phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” has been applied to him. Certainly he had forerunners. In the very early days of the modern study of natural science, isolated observations were made which help to confirm the genetic laws discovered by Mendel. Somewhere about the date of Mendel’s birth, two lectures on crossings of peas were delivered before the London Horticultural Society, one of them by Alexander Setton, and the other by John Goss. Working in a Devonshire village, Goss crossed pea-plants bearing green seeds with pea-plants bearing yellowish-white seeds. While his experiments were in progress, though not before beginning them, Mendel became acquainted with the works of J. Gottlieb Koelreuter, C. f. Gartner, and so on. Charles Naudin, in his Nouvelles recherches sur l’hybridite and in various other monographs, came much nearer than Gartner to anticipating the theoretical aspects of Mendel’s discovery.
